News Briefs

Cardinal Becciu says Torzi arrest is no ‘earthquake’

June 9, 2020 CNA Daily News 0

CNA Staff, Jun 9, 2020 / 03:00 am (CNA).- Cardinal Angelo Becciu has said that the arrest of a businessman at the center of a Vatican property deal will have no wider repercussions and that business in the Vatican “will continue as before.”

Commenting on the June 5 arrest of Gianluigi Torzi, the former sostituto at the Secretariat of State said that he did not know the Italian businessman charged by Vatican prosecutors with fraud, extortion, money laundering and other crimes. Becciu also defended the investment of hundreds of millions of euros in the London property at 60 Sloane Avenue, and said it still represented good value for money.

“I don’t know Torzi, I was no longer sostituto when the facts that are attributed [Torzi] happened,” Becciu told Adnkronos after the announcement of Torzi’s arrest.

Before he was made a cardinal in June, 2018, Becciu was the second-ranking official at the Vatican Secretariat of State, which invested hundreds of millions of euros in the London property between 2014-2018. Torzi acted as a broker, a commission-earning middleman, for the Secretariat of State as it finalized the purchase in 2018 and 2019.

The Adnkronos report offers Becciu’s account of his  role at the Vatican. Becciu insists that Torzi’s involvement in the project came after the cardinal had become head of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints in the summer of 2018, but that the original investment in the building was a sound decision.

“Are you sure that that building was a waste? But there has been no doubt that if sold now it would make double what it cost – 148 million euros when I was there, if there were other [additional expenses] then ask who made them, I was no longer there.”

On Saturday, the cardinal dismissed the idea that Torzi’s arrest would cause a broader “earthquake” in the curia, calling it “a journalistic fantasy.”

Becciu’s interview concluded with his declaration that “[Torzi] will have to answer for a specific crime for which he alone is responsible. And the Vatican will continue as before.”

CNA has reported that between 2014 and 2018, the Secretariat of State paid around $300 million for the building, bought from Italian businessman Raffaele Mincione. Mincione arranged the secretariat’s initial investment through an investment fund through which he managed hundreds of millions of euros for the Secretariat of State.

Completion of the sale was conducted through Gutt SA, a Luxembourg-registered holding company owned by Torzi.

According to a press statement from the Holy See, Torzi was arrested Friday in connection with “well-known events connected with the sale of the London property on Sloane Avenue, which involved a network of companies in which some officials of the Secretariat of State were present.”

In May, CNA reported that in November 2018, a lay official at the Secretariat of State was made a director of Gutt, for a period of one month. That official, Fabrizio Tirabassi, was suspended from his position in October, 2019, following a raid by Vatican investigators.

In his statements to Adnkronos over the weekend, Becciu repeated previous denials that the investment used funds from Peter’s Pence, a fund of donations sent to the Holy See by Catholics and dioceses around the world to support the ministry of the pope.

On Saturday, Vatican News reported that the investments made by the secretariat in Mincione’s Athena Global Opportunities Fund amounted to 200 million euros. It reports Mincione invested this money in the building, which he owned, and other ventures of Mincione’s, which it described to be a “conflict of interest.”

On Nov. 4, 2019, CNA reported that in 2015 Cardinal Becciu seems to have attempted to obscure on Vatican balance sheets nearly 200 million in loans connected to the transaction by cancelling them out against the value of the property in London, an accounting maneuver prohibited by financial policies approved by Pope Francis in 2014.

That apparent attempt to obscure the loans was detected by the Prefecture for the Economy, then led by Cardinal George Pell. Senior officials at the Prefecture for the Economy told CNA in 2019 that Becciu told Pell the cardinal was “interfering in sovereign business” by looking into the secretariat’s dealings with Swiss bank BSI.

BSI was closed by Swiss banking authorities in 2017, following an investigation which found systematic violations of anti-money laundering protections.

On Saturday, Becciu said that Torzi’s involvement in the London property deal came only after he had left the secretariat.

In May, CNA reported that Swiss authorities had frozen tens of millions of euros in several bank accounts as part of the Vatican’s investigation into the deal.

On June 6, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported that among the funds frozen were several million under the control of Msgr. Alberto Perlasca.

Perlasca served under Becciu for nearly a decade as head of the administrative office of the secretariat’s First Section until July 2019, when he was transferred to the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the Holy See’s supreme court. Perlasca worked as a prosecutor at the court, until his office and home were raided by investigators in February.

In an interview with the newspaper Il Giornale on Monday, Perlasca denied that he had any Swiss bank accounts and is “ready to sue anyone who claims otherwise.”

Perlasca said that “there was considerable confusion, I hope not knowingly, between personal accounts and accounts of the Secretariat of State, on which, however, I had no signature power since only the superiors had it. I only had the power to sign in conjunction with another superior. I don’t remember ever having to use it, because there never was a need. In other words: I couldn’t move a single cent.”

Perlasca said he personally lodged a complaint against Torzi in 2018, alleging fraud by the businessman.

Corriere also reported that accounts belonging to Mincione have been seized by Swiss authorities as part of the investigation, as well as those under the control of Enrico Crasso, who has also managed Holy See investments through the Centurion Global Fund.

Crasso told Corriere that the accounts relevant to him were only under his management and not personal accounts. Previously, CNA reported on Centurion’s connections to several institutions subject to allegations of money laundering.

On Saturday, Mincione denied any relationship to Torzi beyond working with him as the secretariat’s chosen intermediary for the completion of the property purchase.

In an interview with Adnkronos, Mincione said that apart from knowing Torzi slightly as a social acquaintance, his contact with him was limited to Torzi’s mandate to act on behalf of the secretariat, given by Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, who replaced Becciu as sostituto in 2018.

Mincione insisted in the interview that his dealings with the secretariat were all legitimate, and that the Holy See could still realize a profit on the London property.

Mincione also appeared to imply that responsibility for Torzi’s involvement could ultimately lay with Pope Francis, saying “there is a picture of Torzi with the pope, which I have. [Torzi] was given this job by Peña Parra, [who was himself] appointed by the pope.”  It is unclear why or how Mincione would have a photo of Torzi with the pope, especially if the two businessmen were not close.

CNA has previously reported that Torzi, along with his family, were received in a private audience with Pope Francis on December 26, 2018. Repeated requests, over several months, to the Holy See asking how the meeting was arranged have gone unanswered.

On the same day as Mincione’s interview with Adnkronos, a picture apparently showing Torzi and his wife with Pope Francis began circulating online.

Perlasca told Il Giornale that “It seems very bad to call the Holy Father directly into this matter.”

“I know that, at the end of December 2018, there was a meeting with him, to which however no representative of the Administrative Office was invited,” Perlasca said.

 

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Catholic nuns in Hawaii shaken but hopeful after robbery

June 8, 2020 CNA Daily News 1

Denver Newsroom, Jun 8, 2020 / 06:01 pm (CNA).- A community of Dominican nuns in Hawaii is shaken but hopeful after a burglar broke into their convent last week and stole a minivan that the nuns use for their ministry.

“It was still a good running car, even if it was 13 years old,” Sister Bernarda Sindol told CNA.

Donations have poured in from far and wide to help the nuns replace the stolen vehicle.

“It’s a blessing in disguise, because now we’re going to buy a new car,” she laughed. 

The sisters awoke May 30 to find their convent had been broken into during the night.

No one was hurt in the robbery; the nuns live on the upper floor, and for their safety have a heavy gate on the door leading upstairs.

In addition to stealing most of the nuns’ food from the kitchen, the assailant took the keys to their minivan— which were hanging on a bulletin board downstairs— and made off with the vehicle.

Six Dominican Sisters of the Rosary live at the convent, which is located behind St. Elizabeth Catholic Church and School in Aiea, about 10 miles northwest of Honolulu on Oahu.

The police are still investigating and have not yet located the stolen vehicle.

The minivan was important for the nuns’ ministry, Sister Bernarda said, because many of them teach at the school adjacent to the convent— which the order has managed since the 1960s— and also at other schools around town.

Having the car made it easier for the nuns to get around, for their ministry and also for things like shopping and errands, without them having to rely on public transportation.

Sister Bernarda said the robber must have known which windows and areas of the convent were not alarmed, and broke in with relative ease.

The thief removed a painting of the Last Supper hanging in the nuns’ dining room, apparently hoping to find a wall safe.

The town lies on Pearl Harbor in a relatively safe area, Sister Bernarda said, so they never really expected a break-in like this.

“Some people just don’t have any respect for the Church. And those are the people we have to pray for,” she said.

As of Monday, a GoFundMe page set up by St. Elizabeth’s pastor had collected more than $31,000 toward a new vehicle for the nuns.

Sister Bernarda said donations have poured in from all over— the last one she saw was from a trucker in Nebraska, who donated $20.

“Twenty dollars is twenty dollars. It’s from people’s hearts, and we appreciate it. People are just so generous,” she said.

Sister Bernarda asked for prayers for an end to the pandemic, as she suspects the thief likely broke into their convent out of desperation.

“People are frustrated, they’ve lost their jobs, they have to feed their families. So we just pray that this coronavirus will go away so that people can live more normally,” she said.

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Christian pastor and pregnant wife killed in Nigeria

June 8, 2020 CNA Daily News 1

CNA Staff, Jun 8, 2020 / 12:00 pm (CNA).- A Christian pastor and his pregnant wife were killed on their farm in northeastern Nigeria last week, the latest victims in a series of abductions and killings of Christians in the country.

Gunmen shot dead Pastor Emmanuel Saba Bileya and his wife, Julianna, on their farm in Taraba, Northeastern Nigeria, on June 1, according to the Robert E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies where Bileya had been enrolled since 2014. Julianna was pregnant with the couple’s ninth child.

Bileya was a pastor in the Christian Reformed Church of Nigeria (CRC-N). He and his wife leave behind eight surviving children, and were buried in Donga on June 5, according to the Hausa Christians Foundation.

A statement released by the state police said that “While they were working on the farm, suddenly armed men came and opened fire on them, leading to the death of the pastor and his wife.”

The Hausa Christians Foundation called the killings part of  a “systematic, direct war against Christianity in Nigeria,” and said that “pastors, Christian leaders and seminarians are either being kidnapped or killed every week” in the country.

Taraba governor Darius Ishaku called the killings “wicked and inhuman” in a statement to the local newspaper This Day, on June 3. 

“Killings of this nature have happened too often recently in Southern Taraba communities and this is unhelpful to the on-going efforts of the government to achieve lasting peace among communities in the area,” said Ishaku.

“I sympathize with the surviving members of Pastor Bileya’s immediate and extended families as well as pastors and members of CRC-N in Mararaba where he served until his death.”

The attack is the latest in a spate of violence against Christians in Nigeria, largely from the terror group Boko Haram, militant nomadic Fulani herdsmen, and the terror group Islamic State West Africa Province (Iswap) and occurring in the Middle Belt and northeast regions of the country.

More than 600 Christians have been killed so far in 2020, according to a report on May 15 by the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law (Intersociety). Christians have been beheaded and set on fire, farms set ablaze, and priests and seminarians have been targeted for kidnapping and ransom.

In January, militants kidnapped four Catholic seminarians from Good Shepherd Seminary in Kaduna and eventually killed one of them, Michael Nnadi. On March 1, Nigerian priest Fr. David Echioda was kidnapped by gunmen after offering Sunday Mass, but was released days afterward.

In an Ash Wednesday letter to Nigerian Catholics, Archbishop Augustine Obiora Akubeze of Benin City called for Catholics to wear black in solidarity with victims and pray in response to the killings and kidnappings.

As the number of Christians killed in the country continues to rise, local leaders have increasingly blamed government inaction to protect lives. The Intersociety report concluded that “atrocities against Christians have gone unchecked,” “with the country’s security forces and concerned political actors looking the other way or colluding with the Jihadists.”

In March, Archbishop Ignatius Kaigama of Abuja, Nigeria, called on President Muhammadu Buhari to address the violence and kidnappings in a homily during Mass with the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria.

“We need to have access to our leaders; president, vice president. We need to work together to eradicate poverty, killings, bad governance and all sorts of challenges facing us as a nation,” Kaigama said.

On Feb. 27, U.S Ambassador at Large for Religious Freedom Sam Brownback told CNA that the situation in Nigeria was deteriorating.

“There’s a lot of people getting killed in Nigeria, and we’re afraid it is going to spread a great deal in that region,” he told CNA. “It is one that’s really popped up on my radar screens — in the last couple of years, but particularly this past year.”

“I think we’ve got to prod the [Nigerian President Muhammadu] Buhari government more. They can do more,” he said. “They’re not bringing these people to justice that are killing religious adherents. They don’t seem to have the sense of urgency to act.”

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